RNC, Day 2: The Calm Before the Storm

ST. PAUL -- Scattered thunderstorms were in the forecast Tuesday. Instead, precipitation is confined to a dismal drizzle, with puddles seemingly oozing upward from the pavement. Outside the Minneapolis Hilton, the convention shuttle bus driver is warning delegates that they must abandon their protection. If you have umbrellas, you cannot bring them aboard the bus.

It's not exactly clear why umbrellas are on the banned-item list -- perhaps there is a fear that, like delegates in a Thomas Nast cartoon, they will hit each other over the over the heads with them -- but if any umbrellas make their way to the perimeter of the Xcel Energy Center, security guards will confiscate them.

Rain is defining this convention: rain here, rain elsewhere. On Tuesday, in the hastily constructed Hurricane Information Center on the first-floor Xcel concourse, Malaura Blanchard blinked back tears as she watched, on one of three large-screen TVs, a CNN reporter about to be blown off a bridge. "Oh, God, there are dead people there, there are dead people there," she murmurs to herself.

Most of the opening-day convention schedule has been scrubbed in deference to Hurricane Gustav, and Wolf Blitzer is doing an odd dance back and forth between Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish, who is trying to tell him how the lives of a "couple of thousand" of people are probably threatened on the west-bank side of the Mississippi, and first lady Laura Bush, who has just stepped up to the convention podium. Blitzer loses voice contact with Nungesser but holds onto Bush, who is nodding her head and mechanically saying, "Thank you...thanks, everybody...thanks a lot" to the applauding delegates.

The Hurricane Information Center features three TVs, a bank of phones, and a sample Red Cross family emergency evacuation kit. Perched on a black stacking chair, Baton Rouge attorney Patrick Martin is fiddling with his cellphone, in a race to figure out who sent a text alert about gas leaks on his street before his battery goes dead.

Back on CNN -- and on the convention stage, which is so close that the speakers' voices can be heard ten seconds ahead of the televised broadcast -- Nungesser is still lost, and Laura Bush has been joined by Cindy McCain.

Bush, outfitted in a reassuring Princess Leia (Episode IV, not V) two-piece suit, and Cindy McCain, resplendent in a gold power suit reminiscent of the X-Men's Jean Grey, try to chart the convention's new course. The BFFs -- even if the campaign of the husband of one of them once suggested that the husband of the other had fathered an illegitimate mixed-race child -- ask Americans to transcend partisan politics and join together to provide hurricane relief.

Earlier, the two had made a surprise visit to the Louisiana delegation breakfast. "They were very gracious, very supportive," says Martin. "They said comforting words about how they were both mothers." For the moment Martin's own stepmother seems to be safe in Clinton, La., but he's worried that his dog, boarded at a Baton Rouge vet's, may not be faring as well.

Blanchard, in high-heeled black suede boots and a sleek cocktail dress, watches transfixed as a CNN floor reporter interviews Louisiana delegate Vickie Davis. Davis's four children and 83-year-old mother were evacuated from Louisiana courtesy of the McCain campaign, which chartered a jet and brought the families of delegates and guests to the Twin Cities. But Blanchard, a guest of the Louisiana delegation, could not get her 11-year-old daughter to Jackson, Miss., in time to make the plane, and now the child's holed up in Blanchard's Baton Rouge home with "definitely upwards of" 27 other family members and friends. "I'm elated" for Davis, she says. "McCain is my hero."

Blanchard was able to talk with her family earlier, and things seemed to be going okay, until her daughter screamed and then said, "Momma, you didn't like that fence in the backyard, did you?" Now water is coming into the house, but "my family won't tell me where."

But 24 hours later, the convention is operating on yet another newly revised, revised schedule. Keynote speaker Rudy Giuliani has been bumped from the podium entirely. (And by doing so, not only preempting the obvious comparisons between a mayor of 8 million and a mayor of seven thousand, but also a favorite parlor game: betting on how many times Rudy can work 9/11 into a single paragraph. On Wednesday night, Giuliani was finally able to deliver a truncated version of his original keynoter. The first mention of 9/11 was delayed for an unprecedented twenty-seven paragraphs. But Giuliani managed to light another fire, leading the delegates in a raucous chant of "Drill, Baby, Drill!") The dead people Malaura Blanchard feared appear to be few, and while the breach in Plaquemines' Citrus Grove levy has grown wider, most everywhere else things seem under control. Laura Bush, now dressed in a celebratory crimson, is introducing her telecommuting husband to the convention crowd.

Roundly criticized for his flyover of Katrina-devastated New Orleans three years ago, Bush canceled his Monday convention speech. The president retreated first to observe Hurricane Gustav preparations from the relative safety of Texas, and then made a beeline back to the certain safety of Washington, D.C., where he could make his convention address from the homeland security of his own desk. Likely his final appearance before a convention as president, Bush's address is probably most memorable for the shout-out to his mom and dad. Mom seemed vaguely displeased while Dad, for his part, seemed to take it with genial good spirits. Perhaps Bush senior was recalling happier memories of New Orleans, when, in 1988, he took a paddlewheeler down the Mississippi River to accept the nomination. In his own stab at maverickhood, the elder Bush docked and named his unforgettable vice presidential pick, Dan Quayle.

On the second night of the convention, it was business as still not quite usual. The body count in Louisiana was low, but the power outages were high. There was an unspoken relief shared, no doubt, by convention organizers that the Republicans had not followed an impulse two years earlier to celebrate this convention in what they anticipated would be a newly restored New Orleans. In the Twin Cities, the Mississippi remains safely contained by its banks.

But relief is a poor substitute for exhilaration. A summer's worth of heat and the drought have not sucked the hockey rink out of the Xcel Energy Center. There is a desultory dampness, the feel of cool and ice and winter, still leaching out of the concrete. Remarkably, for the second night of a national convention, many of the guest seats are empty. Entire sections of have only one or two people sitting in them.

With a schedule so severely truncated, the message of the remaining speakers carries unusual weight. Tuesday's keynoting duties were shared by a successful television actor turned failed presidential candidate and a failed vice presidential candidate turned...well, who knows exactly what he's turned.

For Fred Thompson, the message was tightly focused on the virtues of the ticket. Not since Teddy Roosevelt, he reminds us, has a major political party had the foresight to put a person who can field-dress a moose on the ticket. And John McCain's not bad, either. The portrait the avuncular actor paints is of an independent truth-seeker whose personal hero is Ronald Reagan.

Sen. Joe Lieberman uses his time to beg the indulgence of his Republican hosts as he looks into the television camera and urges his fellow Democrats and Independents to vote for John McCain as a "restless reformer." But what Lieberman inadvertently provides is not an effective contrast between the Democratic and Republican tickets of 2008, but an effective contrast between the Democratic tickets of 2000 and 2008. Where the split with politics-as-usual is found is obvious.

In recent years a political rainmaker has come almost exclusively to mean the person who can bring in the money, and it's often coupled with "indicted." But not too long ago, a political rainmaker was thought to have broader powers. The rainmaker made many things happen, able to conjure not only money but passion and commitment.

It's rare, but this time the Democratic Party has its rainmaker topping the ticket. Once the presumptive GOP nominee was a bit of a rainmaker himself, calling them out from the hills of New Hampshire in the winter of 2000. McCain flashed a bit of the old gift this winter, enough to make sure he was the last man standing, but in the summer of 2008 he seems an older, shopworn, compromised version of the man who rode the original Straight Talk Express.

It's likely you can't be a maverick forever and still be in the game. James Garner has folded his hand; Bret Maverick is now a pitchman for reverse mortgages. McCain desperately needs someone who can open the skies for him.

But there was no one like that in the Energy Center on Tuesday night, as the drumbeat calls forth an incessant drone of status quo. The GOP needs to look elsewhere, and quick. If there's a rainmaker to be found, they might start by checking outside, with the umbrellas.

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